Comment by agd
3 hours ago
I’ve seen the opposite. The best devs are aggressively embracing agents - producing more, and at higher quality.
3 hours ago
I’ve seen the opposite. The best devs are aggressively embracing agents - producing more, and at higher quality.
This is why, to me, it's more interesting to ask the question "how are good devs attaining outsized successes with AI" than "why are good developers wary of AI?"
Yes, there are real reasons to be careful, but that's already obvious to everyone in the field. The real gold is in discovering how successful devs are managing these risks while also retaining the benefits.
From the article:
> they are not hesitant to use a coding assistant, they are hesitant to go all in and let the agents do all the execution.
They are embracing the use of coding agents, but they still want to be in control. That also matches what I see from my most talented colleagues. They outsource certain tasks to the AI and verify the output.
My somewhat unpopular opinion is that only very good developers are able to use AI coding tools somewhat safely. They could have written the code themselves, but it's faster to have the agent do and then verify. The rest of us couldn't write the code, at least not when we start on a project. When we finish, we have some of the skills and could rely more on the AI tools if we were to do it again.
I have a suspicion that eventually you won't have to be a developer to successfully create good software. I do think that familiarity with algorithm design will still help a lot. But ultimately, if your verification, testing, and observability regimes are good enough, the exact implementation shouldn't matter.
I'd lean similarly, but those regimes you list aren't likely going to be done by accident.
This is also my experience in my own bubble. Even my friends who were skeptical for the longest started finding ways to perform cool cross-org work with them and accelerate their coding.
The biggest pocket of skilled holdouts I've noticed are in more artisan spaces where the craft of coding is part of the art. Things like old-school indie game developers where they're still sweating the assembly output and clock cycles.
Yes sir! 100 times this.
The problems is the best devs aren’t the ones doing all the work. You have shitty devs too who are barely thinking or checking anything mixing slop code in with what whatever the best devs are doing, so it all eventually turns to shit.
The job of the best devs is to build the system ("the harness") that let's anyone build near their level of competency by unloading their heuristics into the harness. That is what the most senior, most talented devs on the team need to be doing so that the baseline gets lifted across the board.
It won't be long before the best devs are working and the shit ones are not
Assuming management has the ability to tell the difference and not just count lines of code or commits.
and if this trend will continue the good ones increasingly aren't going to be working either. hopefully they realize they are getting themselves there by cooperating
this assumes it's easy to differentiate between the two groups.